As the number of people communicating over a publicly accessible communication network, such as the Internet, continues to grow, the use, availability and distribution of media content via the Internet, such as video and audio media files, grows as well. The popularity of delivering and experiencing media content via the Internet continues to grow because the Internet provides for both immediacy of the media and interactivity of the media. Media content can provide a rich interactive user experience from a network connected device. In addition, media content delivered to computing devices via a network may receive input from the user or information about the user to both personalize and dynamically enhance the user experience, thereby further increasing the immediacy and interactivity of the medium.
As such, delivering media content via the Internet is quickly gaining adoption as a mechanism for reaching consumers for purposes of marketing and monetizing media content or media assets. For example, traditional broadcasting services, such as television and television advertising, are interested in transforming broadcasting content, advertisement and other media assets into Internet delivered content and Internet enabled consumer experiences that can be monetized, controlled and managed. However, even with increasing improvements in consumer devices, broadband technologies and multimedia interfaces, the adoption and movement towards Internet or Internet Protocol (IP) based delivery of media content to consumer devices raises various challenges in development, implementation and deployment, including content ingestion, media encoding and transcoding, content and catalog management, publishing and delivery, device targeting, digital rights management, and reporting.
One challenge facing the development of IP-based media delivery is delivering offline media content that provides a similar user experience to online content of a content provider. Content providers may invest thousands to millions of dollars in designing online content having rich interactive content to present a brand, attract new customers, and maintain customer loyalty. The content provider may use an online content development tool, such as a web-site development tool to create, edit and maintain the appearance of the online content and corresponding interaction with the user. In some cases, a content provider may want to deliver or have the user download content to the user's client to be viewed locally or offline on the client. For example, this may be in order to provide a better viewing performance of higher quality media, such as high definition video. In another example, downloading content to the user's client may allow the user to view the content when not connected to the network. To create, edit, and maintain the appearance and behavior of the offline content the content provider may use an offline content development tool
As the content provider has invested in the design and branding of online content, the content provider may try to design the offline content to be similar to the online content. However, using a different development tool for creating offline content as compared to the online content may present challenges in providing a similar user experience, content design and branding of which the content provider has invested. For example, the offline content development tool may use different user interface elements than the user interface of the online content development tool. As such, the appearance and behavior of user interface elements may not appear the same in the offline experience as the online experience. Additionally, the content provider may need to become proficient using both the online and offline content development tools. Furthermore, every time a change is made in the online content with the online content development tool, a corresponding change needs to be made in the offline content with the offline content development tool. Therefore, systems and methods are desired for developing online and offline content from a single development tool that automatically provides for the offline content, which delivers a similar user experience as the appearance and behavior of the online content.